Latest Review: "Passionate Nomads" by María Rosa Lojo

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Jan Pytalski on María Rosa Lojo’s Passionate Nomads, translated by Brett Alan Sanders, published by Aliform Publishing.

Jan (a.k.a. Janek) is a current student in the MA in Literary Translation Studies at the University of Rochester, and hails from Great Poland (where the potato was invented). As a Fulbright scholar and Eastern European, his duties include playing on our Literary Folk indoor soccer league team, teaching us how to make paçzki, and introducing us to some great Polish literature. He’s also a great lover of world literature in general. This review is one of several we’ll be posting in the near future, written as assignments by Chad’s Intro to Publishing students. Here’s the beginning of Janek’s review:

Passionate Nomads, by Argentinian writer María Rosa Lojo, comes to us from Aliform Publishing in a riveting translation from its Spanish original by Brett Alan Sanders. And before I get into the book’s details, allow me to first make a quick and rather bold statement: if these roughly 250 pages of prose lack anything, it’s proper marketing and getting word about it out there. Consider this an executive order, if you will, to dig deep into your pockets and buy a copy.

Behind the publishing of Passionate Nomads is also a passionate story. Sanders received a grant to translate the book, but due to external circumstances had to make a rather dramatic decision and in the end used the grant to actually publish the book. Now, if that’s not passionate enough for you, I don’t know what is. Ursula K. Le Guin blurbed the book and wrote:

“ Passionate Nomads is a most extraordinary addition to the literature of the New World . . . Lojo evokes a profound fantasy of the real—not a rewriting of history, but an imaginative recall and understanding of what has been forgotten, cannot be remembered, and yet must be remembered.”

For the rest of the review, go here.